O Tannenbaum

Tree time once again.  On the way up, Floyd was convinced we would be in the mud this year.  I was betting on snow.  

Clearly, I won.

There was lots of deep, heavy snow, which kinda abbreviated the time spent searching. It was a serious workout. The kids didn't seem to mind the deep snow or the freezing temps, however, 

 

 

The tree hunt was further abbreviated when the wind started to blow and this large tree blew down, landing in between Floyd and I.  Luckily, he noticed and took a step back while yelling, "look out!" or we would have some serious headaches today. I dove out of the way and the tree landed right above my feet. It scared all the kids pretty good cause they thought it landed on me since they couldn't see me once it came down. 

 

But, despite that, trees were found, donuts and hot chocolate were consumed and we stuck around long enough to get a little sledding in.  

 

And my favorite part of the day was that we stuck around long enough to enjoy this view all the way home.

Wind Caves

 Cole's teacher set up a fun extra field trip one Saturday and invited the class to hike to the Wind Caves with her.  Floyd got to take him on the hike and looking at these pictures, I am remembering that I got to stay home and entertain three children.  Clearly, I was the loser that day. 

Logan Canyon is just breathtaking in the fall.  I'm glad they got to go.

 

Next time, I'm taking the hiking shift and Floyd gets to entertain the littles.

Building

Pardon the unoriginalness of this title, but we are building a house. We broke ground last month and things are slowly coming along. 

We love our view! I'm hoping to watch the sunset every night. At our old house, our west view was totally consumed by our back-fence neighbor's house. This is a definite improvement.

 

It was fun to let the kids run around the lot and try to describe what the house would be like. They're pretty excited.

 

I'm glad we are building this year before Ben is in Kindergarten. He is in heaven watching and helping the whole process. 

He was fascinated by the excavator and totally destroyed when Floyd wouldn't let him ask to ride it.

 

 

After the hole was dug, Ben got right to work laying out the outline for where his sandbox will go. All the important details, you know.

 

Molly gets right to business every time we stop by. She loves it there. I'm pretty excited for all the trenches to get filled in so I can stop chasing her away from the edge.

Because of the slope of the lot, we had to haul in 235 tons of rock to fill the basement. 235 tons! That was a lot of rock.

But, don't worry.  It came with this super-cool truck to shoot it into the basement, so Ben was happy.

This kid would build the entire house if we let him!

And, he'd probably get it done quicker than the big boys...

 

It's UEA!

 We took a quick trip to Park City with my family for UEA weekend. Floyd was fishing, so he missed out on the party. We shopped (a little), we alpine-slid, we alpine-coasted (scary!), we picnicked, and we visited Cascade Springs.

We packed a lot into such a short little trip. It was lovely.

Fire! Fire! Fire!

Story hour at the Newton Library was all about fire safety a few weeks ago, so we went out for the fun. They had lots of fun activities set up, but of course the big ticket was the actual firetruck.  

Ben has been pretty fond of firetrucks ever since Dad tried to burn the house down a few years ago and one (actually 8) visited our house. 

Even little Molly-Pop got in on the action. She was pretty impressed. 

The Maple Tree

My brother has the best tree. It used to be my grandparent's tree and then it was my sister's tree. I'm glad my grandparents house has stayed in the family, but I think I'd miss the old maple tree more than the house if it ever left the family. It is just such a great tree. It's awesome for climbing and for swinging and especially for playing in the leaves.  Lauryn invited us out to play a few weeks ago and my kids had a great time.

P.S. Cole was there too! Not sure why he isn't in any of the pictures.

Golden Girls

I made my girls some cute matching twirl skirts a few weeks ago. One night, the sun was so golden that I wanted to take some pictures of them in their golden skirts. It was fun, but not necessarily productive because:

A) Molly was a wandering gnome. We couldn't keep her contained for five seconds, resulting in very few face shots.

 

 

and B) Miss Annie was in a bit of a silly mood, resulting in lots of funny poses.

 

 

 

But, despite that, we had a lot of fun and snapped pictures til the sun sank below the mountains.

 

 

 

 I just love these golden fall evenings.